Food stamp raid strange strategy against hunger

Two years into the Great Recession, as it gets harder to see the signs reading “This Way Out,” there’s one landmark that’s hard to miss.

The total of Americans getting food stamps is now well over 40 million, close to one in six, which is not really an astonishing number:

Recessions, like long hikes in the wilderness, make you hungry.

Still, there is something surprising about the food stamp issue at the moment. Recently, the U.S. Senate surprised everybody by actually passing two significant pieces of legislation, an emergency $26 billion aid bill for the states — ratified by the House in a special summer session Tuesday — and a reauthorization of child nutrition programs. Needing money to make both pencil out, Congress went to an unexpected payday loan source: the food stamp program.

Because, when you need some money when times are tough, go see what you can get out of the grocery bags.

“The food stamp program is now the last fundamental safety net program for poor people,” says James Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center in Washington, D.C. “If we’ve reached a point where the only way Congress can figure out to pay for something is food stamps, it’s not a good place to be.”

One reason food stamps are a tempting target — other than because we’re in the worst recession in 75 years, there’s a lot of money in food stamps — is that the program’s family allotments were increased in last year’s stimulus bill. The idea was both that people would be needing some more help — which turned out to be a buffet-level understatement — but that food stamps are a hugely effective stimulus, because people tend to spend them quickly.

(U.S. companies are said to be sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, waiting to see what happens next. Nobody sits on their food stamps waiting to see what happens next.)

So people decided they could find money by cutting back the increases in the future — even though most economists are talking about above-average unemployment as far as the eye can see. (How far economists’ eyes can see is another question.)

Still, it seemed like a lot of money lying out there, and even folks from the Obama administration were hinting that maybe Congress could dip into it. So looking for offsets for the state aid bill, Congress came up with first $6.7 billion, then $12 billion from food stamps. Now the Senate, to make the child nutrition reauthorization numbers work, has gone into the food stamp money again, with Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., shrugging that if she hadn’t, someone else would have gone after it.

The two examples are different. For the state aid bill, the school year starts this month but the food stamp cuts don’t start until 2014, and even Congress might figure out an alternative strategy by then. As House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., said, “The cutbacks in food stamps in the bill are plain wrong.”

But the child nutrition reauthorization is supposed to be driven by President Barack Obama’s campaign pledge to end child hunger in America by 2015. Cutting food stamps in the same bill seems a little contradictory.

That funding approach is in the Senate version of the bill. The full House hasn’t acted yet, and doesn’t seem happy. There’s an uprising among several Democratic members, and the chance of undoing this food raid as well.

“I find the symbolism offensive,” says Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., who as a member of the Ways and Means Committee is part of the search for different money. “I don’t think it’s defensible.”

Still, in congressional terms, the situation can be resolved. For more than 40 million Americans on food stamps, not to mention the ones likely to need some help in 2014 — and the American children supposed to be free of hunger by 2015 — that could be a serving of reassurance.